Nikolai Lyzlov reconstructed a 19th-century brick building adjacent to the Soviet dormitory of the Linguistic University (formerly the Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages) on Boevskaya Street, turning it into the office of the railway company RusAgroTrans, and received a 2015 Golden Section laureate diploma for this work. The superstructure of Stalin's time was dismantled and replaced with a new one, with three floors inside instead of two and similar brick walls. The walls of the 19th century were made using bricks from the internal partitions; the plinth was covered with stone. Interiors, on the other hand, give the visitor to experience three "environmental sensations".
Description from the architectural studio:
The plot in question is located in the Eastern Administrative District at the intersection of Babaevskaya and 2nd Boevskaya streets, 500 meters east of the Sokolniki metro station and 200 meters from the nearest public transport stops. A non-residential four-storey building was subject to reconstruction. The southeastern border of the site goes to the 2nd Boevskaya street, from which the entrance to the building is carried out. The southwest façade adjoins the dormitory building, forming a closed loop of the courtyard. The drive to the courtyard is supposed to go through the existing arches into the building contour. The surrounding development is represented by residential buildings from five to eight floors.
The initially reconstructed building is a two-story red-brick school building, built at the end of the 19th century and oriented perpendicularly to 2nd Boevskaya Street, which stretches between Stromynka and Matrosskaya Tishina. From Rusakov's club, from Babaevskaya, one can see the end of the building. In Stalin's time, the educational institution was converted into a factory and built on a couple of floors. Obviously, at the same time the territory turned out to be littered with one-story buildings. Already in the post-Soviet period, the upper two floors of the building were covered with siding.
The task was to adapt the former school, and then the industrial building for the office of a company specializing in rail freight.
During the reconstruction, the superstructure was dismantled and the walls of the building were carefully cleaned out. Where there was damage, native bricks, carefully removed from the inside of the powerful walls of the building, managed to sharpen, patch up the existing gaps. Of the two entrances, which at one time served two halves of the school - male and female, one, the nearest to Stromynka, was left as a worker, the second is used as a firefighter. The wrought-iron canopies are new, made according to the models, since the historical ones have not survived. The plaster base was replaced with a dolomite one - with the exception of the courtyard, formed by the reconstructed building and the dormitory of the Linguistic University attached to it in the sixties, overlooking Babaevskaya Street.
On the red-brick base, a red-brick superstructure was built up - one to one in size, only without the characteristic carved details: rosettes, belts and sandrids. The brick is nuancedly different from the "original", including in color. Metal lintels appeared in the windows of the upper two floors - under Aldo Rossi, only dimmer in color. The house is crowned with a simple cornice with an extension, and the motif uniting the “top” and “bottom” is high-quality woodwork, painted in an ocher tone.
Landscaping without any hint of excesses: unpretentious brick fence posts, in tune with the main volume, gates and a forged lattice of a strict orthogonal pattern, laconic lamps, smooth, neatly trimmed green lawns with a reinforcing lattice. Green spaces on the site are represented by coniferous trees. Old larch trees have been preserved in the yard, as well as a blue spruce in the corner of the plot. A number of western thujas have been planted along the northeastern border of the site. At the entrance from the 2nd Boevskaya in the near future, another glass security booth should appear.
In the interior of the building, after reconstruction, three figurative layers are clearly distinguishable, which generate the corresponding environmental sensations - they can be conventionally designated as authentic, sterile and the atmosphere of a loft. They lie in the building - in layers.
The first two floors, as well as the basement, part of which is set aside for a cafe, and the other for technical rooms, are cleared of layers as much as possible. Stripped of painted plaster and coated with a special varnish, the red-brick walls appeared in their unedited primordiality. In several places where the holes made by time turned out to be unrecoverable, they are without false hesitation covered with concrete patches. Monier's vaults are also freed from plaster and painted white. The floors are covered with textured black ceramic tiles, and at the reception they are concrete with large-format "torn" inserts of light marble. In contrast, there are invisible glass partitions. Against this harsh background, open heating radiators - still of the Stalinist call, but cleaned and processed with metal crumbs, the flourishes of lamps and the avaricious black and white silk-screen printing - look accentuated. Another potential accent is on the stairs: a fresco preserved from Stalinist times, freed from layers of paint, tattered, with peeling rags - awaiting restoration. Wooden staircases were dismantled, a metal frame was inserted - beams with kosoura, on which stair flights from a monolith rest - as they say, "as it is": not tinted and not licked. Fences - forged, with oak railings.
A couple of built-up floors are characterized by office restraint, but not without industrial references. The walls are covered with light gray plaster with concrete grout. The floors are self-leveling, scuffs are taken for granted, like, say, in a parking lot. The ceilings are noticeably lower than in the historical part - with a suspended stylish grille and air ducts open into the interior. Radiators, lighting fixtures and furniture form another visual layer away from the distilled lifelessness of the operating room.
The attic level is a classic open space office with overhead lighting, separated from the corridor by a translucent glass partition. Its distinctive feature is the glued pine truss structure, which is open to the interior and refers to the aesthetics of lofts. The smell of wood fills the space even today, six months after the completion of the building. The pleasantness of tactile sensations need not be mentioned.
Juliana Golovina
